It's curious to me that whenever these kinds of stories emerge the arguments of "why don't we spend the time/money being expended on this frivolous activity on more useful problems" are nonexistent. Contrast this with stories involving higher order aspirations (like space exploration) and those comments are legion. It's like we are drawn to the mundane out of comfort and shirk the aspirational out of fear.
If you think that fashion and perfumery are “the mundane” you are sorely wrong.
They are the most anthropologically interesting endeavor I can think of, except for maybe more formally studying remote tribes.
Scents in particular is an extremely fascinating industry, marketing the invisible and crafting cultural narratives around the most primal and underrated sense we have.
What exactly is your opinion, out of interest, like how does it work? Do all the miriads of people who buy fragrances or fragrant-induced products (not to mention all the workers of that industry) just spend their money and resources on something that makes them no benefit whatsoever because they are what, too stupid? Or like they don't understand what they like? Or can't form their own decisions? In what way do those numbers not speak of some amount of "serving" these people receive from the fragrance industry? Since they keep using it, keep pouring their resources into it?
Also where do you draw the line? How about video games? Do they really serve humanity after all? Porn? Christmas lights? All the work spent on designing and constructing beautiful buildings? Should all buildings just be efficient faceless boxes because it saves more resources?
By this area do you mean fragrances? Or the application of AI in this specific example?
If the latter I'm inclined to agree with you, since there's already more fragrances out there than I could ever hope to sniff, and many of the ones I have sniffed smelled pretty amazing without AI.
If the former, I think it's a bit much to just dismiss fragrances as pointless so easily; people have been obsessed with taste and smell for thousands of years, and indeed it has shaped the course of history e.g. spice trade etc., so clearly fragrances are involved with a very basic and important human need.
>people have been obsessed with taste and smell for thousands of years, and indeed it has shaped the course of history e.g. spice trade etc., so clearly fragrances are involved with a very basic and important human need.
You can't assume that just because people are obsessed with something it is a basic need. One counterexample would be that thing where they implant wires in the right spot in your brain and you become obsessed with pressing the button to zap yourself.
Firstly you misquote me, secondly you cite a highly artifical and slightly bizarre example that if anything disproves what you are trying to prove, and thirdly I'm not really sure I see the point of quibbling with the fact that our sense of smell/taste is tightly bound with survival, which was kind of my overall point albeit poorly expressed perhaps.
AI could help with detecting people wearing them and singling those people out for fines and/or education on how wearing fragrances is extremely inconsiderate to others.
One of the most fascinating people I had the good fortune to cross paths with while living in the Bay Area was a women who worked as a _very_ high end scent consultant. She'd routinely fly across the world to figure out how the various areas of a new Four Seasons or some such should smell before it opened.
One of the more interesting engagements she told me about was to figure out the best smell to be used in olfactory warning systems for loud underground mining environments. If you're wearing so much PPE you cant hear anything, apparently pumping the smell of gag inducing rotting cabbage is the most sure fire way to ensure everyone in the mine knows to get out _now_.
If only this sense could be elevated and respected at the level of, say, hearing.
Then just as with unwanted noise, perhaps cultural norms could shift such that people who inflict "pleasant" or "fascinating" fragrances on others who find them irksome would be discouraged from doing so the the extent that they do now.
It's still "just" a kind of art. It's not going to let us populate a new planet or harvest space minerals. Art is valuable but the point of the person you're responding to still stands.
Making one vial of perfume is art. Making millions needs some complicated chemical and logistic apparatus behind it.
And art does make technology evolve. History of art is constrained by the techniques and products available at the time. Painters have always chased elusive colors and chemists have strived to give them what they wanted for cheap prices.
The convenience of going to a modern paint shop and getting pretty much any color you want is a modern luxury.
Art would most definitely help us populate a new planet or harvest space materials. It paves the way, quite literally, in the imagination to even understand it might be possible and the implications of such.
Additionally, a society that has no meaningful manner of media, culture, or expression sounds exactly like the sort of stuff that art has been exploring for decades. It’s usually not portrayed as some sort of utilitarian utopia though...
If you're using AI and consumer testing to determine every parameter of your product, which is then manufactured and sold to consumers with the goal of making money, you may have abandoned your claim on the category of "artistic expression." The parent comment by galacticaactual was comparing space travel with the manufacture of optimized luxury widgets, not with personal expression.
We tend to not question free spending, while we tend to try to keep our governments under strict control. You may disagree on the degrees we do those, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong here.
When I think those kinds of questions, I inevitably realize it's all emergent behavior. People do things locally in their own self-interests. If more people were employed in space exploration, there would be more ai applied to space exploration. But more people are involved in fragrances, so you get this.
Why isn't AI involved in automatic hand washing and toilet flushing, which has not reached state of the art. because people buy a new toilet maybe once a decade, even though the benefit to society in hygiene and water savings would be large.
